God’s Country
GOD’S COUNTRY. That’s what my husband’s grandmother calls this land of rolling fields and sprawling cities. She grew up forty-five minutes from the University of Notre Dame, and when she heard Bryan had decided to come here for his PhD, she was thrilled. “You’ll absolutely love it there,” she told us. “That’s God’s country.”
When it comes to divine landscape, I’ve always pictured the cover of U2’s Joshua Tree album—wildly desolate and wide open. I spent half my childhood in such terrain, up in the mountains or out in the desert. After I got a copy of the album, I wandered while humming “In God’s Country.” But suburbs and farmland as God’s country? I’ll admit it; I disagreed. A major criterion in bestowing a name like that, I argued, is the ability to actually see some of the country. So much of the Midwest is paved under asphalt or planted down in corn that I really had no idea what the raw place looks like. God’s country cannot possibly be so masked and cluttered. At least that was my impression before coming.
I realize for some people (maybe even most people) landscape is just not that big of a deal. As long as health, or employment, or housing, or the family dynamic is good, they could just as happily live on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska, as on the outskirts of Yosemite. But for our family, wild landscape is crucial—in the top three at least. So choosing to move to the Midwest, a small step by most calculations, was a giant leap for this particular fragment of mankind.
Which is where this train of thought joins up with consecration. When I was young, I understood the word consecration to mean grandiose things: putting all of one’s money in a communal pot, standing in line to be handed a pair of shoes, bedding down in matching huts. But over the years the concept has come to mean much more subtle (and more difficult) things. I haven’t been asked to work in the kitchen-of-the-masses, or to deposit our monthly income into a group fund. But I have committed to pool my time, talents, and pretty much everything else—if not in practice, then at least in theory. And that’s a tall order. Reconciling the need to give to others with the need to give to oneself can sometimes be confusing, frustrating, and downright obnoxious.
And yet.
When consecration is no longer about giving what I’ve got, and instead becomes centered on my attitude toward giving, even to myself, remarkable things have happened. New realities replace old ones; ideas of need and beauty and expectations can transform into the very things that seemed their antithesis. In spite of all my arid, aspen-covered dreams, I am becoming attached to this place. The plains and riverbanks have their own spectacular beauty, and the people inhabiting them even more so. I have found that my idea of God’s country is shifting and expanding, along with my appreciation of where I am. Consecration has come to mean being open to giving out what I’m not sure I’ve got extra of (or even enough of): time, energy, money, attention. Including, at least for the time being, my sense of place.
Apparently I am not the only one. This issue of Segullah is loaded with consecration, at disparate levels and in varied forms, but all headed in the same direction—taking what we do, and have, and are, and creating something worthy of the term consecrated, of being set aside for the Lord. We are all of us, in our own ways, pulling wherever we live within the boundaries of God’s country.
